On Calling Jesus Lord

“No one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except in the Holy Spirit.”

“On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord’.”

Critics of the Bible like to pit unrelated verses against one another in hope of identifying a contradiction and thereby discrediting scripture. Yet my personal experience over sixty years has been that examining any pair of apparent Bible contradictions in context generally has the effect of making perceived difficulties vanish in the proverbial puff of smoke.

An Intriguing Duo

This we should expect, given that we have a consistent God with a consistent Spirit who produced a consistent scripture. What’s wildly inconsistent is the amount of effort the critics are willing to spend attempting to promote nonexistent consistency problems weighed against the frequency with which their criticisms actually accomplish what they hope.

So let’s solve this intriguing pair for them, shall we?

In the first verse, Paul tells us nobody can say, “Jesus is Lord” except in the Holy Spirit. In the second verse, Matthew gives us people in a future day saying “Lord” (not once but twice) whom Christ never knew, and who definitely did not speak in the Holy Spirit. His esteemed title is practically tripping off their tongues, though it will not do them any good.

So then, was Paul kidding or misinformed in what he wrote to Corinth? I will argue he was neither.

Context Context Context

Let’s start with the 1 Corinthians excerpt. Yes, we are going to examine the context and not just accept an isolated statement at face value.

Consider this: when a man got up to participate audibly in a first century Christian gathering, he did not have a copy of the entire New Testament in his hand. He may not have had any of it. When Paul wrote 1 Corinthians, only four of the NT books had even been committed to parchment: Galatians, James and his two letters to Thessalonica. That means the gatherings in Corinth were quite unlike what most of us do on Sunday mornings, as we will recognize if we read the rest of Paul’s letter.

As Paul says elsewhere in 1 Corinthians, the most important gift in the early first century church was prophecy. This is not because prophecy would turn out to be more important than all the other gifts across the arc of church history. (In fact, like other sign gifts, Paul declared it would pass away.) Rather, it was because the ability to receive direct personal messages from God was crucial to local churches until the apostles finished delivering the faith to the saints in written form around AD95. Until then, where else could believers hear truths specific to the Church Era unless they had an apostle or his co-workers visiting?

Today, the word of God is complete. Any reasonably intelligent man with a teaching gift or the basic ability to read, think and speak clearly can tell us what it says. No new revelation is required for life and godliness at this point in history. When we hear the words “Thus saith the Lord” in church, we know we are about to get a quotation we can find somewhere in our Bibles, not a new idea we’ve never heard before. At least, we sure hope so.

Testing the Spirits about Christ

Of course, in first century meetings it was necessary to find ways to test the spirits, by which I mean to check whether any alleged prophetic gift was or was not genuine. False prophets have always been thick on the ground, and the era of the early Church was no exception. Later in the first century, John would write, “Many false prophets have gone out into the world.” In that time, it would be no surprise to find one or more of these lurking in your local church, seeking to deceive and control the faithful. As we discovered during COVID, some people just love to order others around, even in Christian circles. If barking out the orders in a first century local church required you to fib about which spiritual domain your instructions were coming from, some men (and women) were invariably ready and willing to stoop that low. A little extra status among God’s people was worth it to men of debased mind who did not know God or understand the risk they were taking by misrepresenting him.

So then, in our first quotation today, Paul is reminding the Corinthians how spiritual gifts worked in the early church. He’s telling them in broad strokes how it looked when they were hearing a real message from the Holy Spirit as opposed to a devilish counterfeit. He begins by telling them that no prophet — no man speaking in the Spirit of God — would ever say something like “Jesus is accursed.” This, I think, is what John meant when he wrote that the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy. The purpose of the prophetic word is to testify to Christ. All true prophets spoke well of Christ and submitted to him. This is the first way the Corinthians could test the spirits and see whether they were from God: What do they say about Jesus?

Other Ways to Test the Spirits

A second way is still open to us today; it’s how we judge teachers, by comparing scripture with scripture. It’s just like the way the Jews in Berea judged Paul’s prophetic gift to see if what he told them was consistent with the truth they had already received and could be sure of. As in the OT, any purported new prophetic revelation must accord with previous revelation. God is not double-minded, and he does not speak out both sides of his mouth. A true new word from his Spirit would always be in harmony with the existing written Word. The Bereans figured comparing Paul’s teaching with a known constant would help them get at the truth. They were right.

Yet another test of true prophecy was the fruit it produced. A genuine, God-given prophetic word could only produce godly fruit, and false prophecy could only produce failure and lies. But where the first two tests of a prophet could be performed immediately, observing the long-term consequences of obeying a so-called prophet’s advice might take … a long time. That made the first two methods exceedingly useful.

There was a fourth method of testing prophets as well, though we do not have it available to us today as far as I know. One of the other gifts of the Holy Spirit is “the ability to distinguish between spirits”. With the gift of prophecy to the churches came a God-given antidote to false prophecy: the man who could discern false from true by what was probably an instinctual reaction of the Spirit of God within him. That would be a handy fellow to have in your first century church, but with the obsolescence of the prophetic gift, it seems unlikely the Spirit would have continued to give a gift of miraculous discernment. Christ’s intent was that by comparing scripture with scripture, all believers would grow in discernment to the point that regular manifestations of the supernatural in a favored few would no longer be necessary.

False Prophecy No Accident

Here is the core truth I am trying to get at: false prophecy in the church was never innocent. It was never an accident in the way that a teacher may misspeak or make a theological mistake. It was always a product of demonic activity. The fact that the aforementioned gift enabled some Christians to distinguish between spirits makes that evident. If a man were not speaking by the Spirit of God, some nefarious power was surely animating his prophecy. There was no third position. As Doug Wilson likes to say, it was either Christ or chaos. Nothing in between.

To make the point clearer, demons do not acknowledge Christ as Lord. Never, for obvious reasons: they are in rebellion against heaven and cannot afford to bend the knee to the One to whom belongs all authority. Perhaps they would spontaneously implode, I can’t guess.

Don’t Get Me Wrong

Don’t get me wrong, evil spirits most definitely recognized Jesus for who he really was. They called him “the Holy One of God”, “Son of the Most High God” and “the Son of God”. They knew exactly who he was with a level of precision and clarity we might not expect, and he terrified them because he had the power to do with them and to them whatever he pleased. But they never once called him Lord.

Why not? “Lord” means Master. Proclaiming Jesus as Lord is not just an intellectual acknowledgement of his God-given authority and imminent status. It’s an implicit admission that only he calls the shots. Right now. Over you. It’s a declaration of the speaker’s determination to submit his will to that of Christ. Unclean spirits are not interested in doing that.

So then, no man speaking by the power of an unclean spirit can call Jesus “Lord”. How could he? His masters cannot.

An Advantage Over Demons

In this respect, human beings have some sort of dubious advantage over demons and unclean spirits. At very least, we have greater autonomy, or perhaps less reverent fear of consequences. Unless we are speaking under the sway of an evil spirit, as every false prophet was without exception, you and I can choose for ourselves to lie through our teeth with no problem at all. We can call Jesus “Lord” without blinking, even if it’s the most gigantic fabrication ever. We can do what no demon dares. That’s an alarming thought.

In our second quotation from today’s post, Matthew has written down the words of the Lord Jesus concerning the final judgment. In every case except one, those who acknowledge Jesus as “Lord, Lord” in that context will not do so under the power of any spirit, good or evil. There will be no spirit animating them in that moment because the deceiving spirits will all be bound: the era of pure experience will have arrived. Nothing that man sees in front of his eyes on that day will require him to drum up belief in it. It will simply be there, terrifyingly real. In coming face to face with the glorified Christ for the first time, the people in our second verse will simply state inarguable facts: he is Lord, like it or not. Thus they will call him “Lord” twice.

Will confessing that truth help them? Not one bit. The Lord who never knew them will cast them into the outer darkness.

Autonomy We Can Do Without

You may not think the remarkable ability to choose eternity in hell by lying to God and to oneself is any advantage. I don’t. That sort of autonomy I can definitely do without.

It’s also not a contradiction, just a difference in context.